YouSaid · the spoken record

Jason Rezaian

lines on the record: 76
first: 2019-05-06
most recent: 2019-05-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Think it was at all. And I think if anything, the fact that that episode aired and aired so often. During my imprisonment, and that Anthony Bourdain became such a vocal proponent of our freedom, made a difference and in a positive way. And he's no longer around to Talk about this, but I had the opportunity to kind of calm those fears because, of course, he had heard from a lot of people that it must have been because Jason was on your show that he ended up in prison. And it actually never came up in my interrogation.”
2019-05-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 324 — Jason Rezaian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My mother in law is a fantastic cook, and we have a really nice kind of traditional home if you guys want to shoot here. You'd be more than welcome to do that. And they were kind of not interested. And then all of a sudden they said, well, would you and Yegi, my wife, join us for a shoot in a restaurant? And we said, yeah, of course. And to me, it was not something that was alarming in terms of raising my profile. For me, this was just sort of... Validation of the kind of work that I've been doing for years. And the fact that our most intrepid television personality was in the town that I called home and wanted to include my wife and me in his showing of that place. Nothing could have been better”
2019-05-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 324 — Jason Rezaian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why would they think that me on Facebook or something I didn't take any offense because it was true. And I gave him a whole list of places that I thought would be evocative restaurants, but also neighborhoods and experiences that they could capture. And I told them, I said, you know, my wife's not much of a cook. She is now. She's an incredible cook, actually. But my mother-in-law is obviously.”
2019-05-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 324 — Jason Rezaian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wasn't concerned at all, actually, for years I had been communicating with the producer on an earlier iteration of his show about them coming to do an episode when it was still on the travel channel. And the network's insurance would not cover a team to go to Iran. But when he joined CNN, the equation changed. And actually, they didn't contact me until just a couple of days before they were going to come. And one of the producers got in touch and said, you know, We heard that you're the guy to talk to about finding a decent meal in Tehran.”
2019-05-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 324 — Jason Rezaian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, I came up with a sort of recipe for myself. The proclamations that authoritarian leaders make in a press conference are the same things that they're going to say when they give a speech, are the same things that they're going to say to you in private. AP and Reuters and everybody else covers those things. I'm going to go out and see how these proclamations affect the normal people on the street. What's life really like? We are missing a window into this society. Can I provide one? And that's what I took as my own personal challenge and what I tried to do for those years.”
2019-05-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 324 — Jason Rezaian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I played by the rules. I always in my working years in Iran played by the rules because I understood that To not do so meant that I might suffer a different kind of fate, either being removed from the scene permanently, thrown out of the country, or thrown into a cell.”
2019-05-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 324 — Jason Rezaian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a journalist, so I was in constant contact with the press ministry in Tehran, and they kept saying to me, you know, you're more than welcome to come back. You're a citizen of this country. I hold dual citizenship. You can come back any time, but you're not going to be allowed to work. And every few weeks I would call again and say, is it time to come back? And they said, no, no, you're welcome to come back. You just can't work. And then one day I showed up at the office. And the secretary's face went very pale. And she said, what are you doing here? It's very dangerous for you here. I said, you told me that it's my country that I can come back, but I just can't work. She said, yes, yes. I didn't mean it.”
2019-05-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 324 — Jason Rezaian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And she was from Tehran and happened to be visiting Dubai where She and her older sister could kind of take a breather from these protests that were Consuming life in Iran, and we had a chance encounter. And we've been together ever since. And it gave me a reason to go back to Iran.”
2019-05-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 324 — Jason Rezaian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it was fairly obvious. We don't want coverage of what's happening here. And two, if you stay, bad things might happen. To you. Me and to others at the time Iranian elections are usually a time when more journalists are allowed in the country than at other times of the year. There were several dozen and probably half a dozen who were based there full-time. And so I left for a couple of months.”
2019-05-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 324 — Jason Rezaian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The message that I was given was you can't work anymore. You got to stop, shut it down. You should leave the country. And I was... Was your name?”
2019-05-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 324 — Jason Rezaian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, I think We can make a lot of fresh decisions in hindsight, and I know that the administration took a lot of heat for not being more vocal at the moment. The reality is that for the past 40 years, 30 years up to that point, we had very few windows into what was actually going on in Iran. If you think back to the Cold War and our relationship or non-relationship with the Soviet Union, we always had reporters on the ground. We had diplomats on the ground, and we had better intelligence. And I think that that was a moment where we were caught flat-footed, right? We didn't expect that to happen. And the response, I think, could have been more vocal in support of reformers. But how could you have known what the right thing to do was in that moment without a Of diplomats and other professionals telling you what's going on on the ground.”
2019-05-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 324 — Jason Rezaian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you know, the protests began very quickly and spiraled out of control. And I was there to cover them from the ground. And it really opened up an opportunity for me that I hadn't had before. And in the five years after that, I was never out of work”
2019-05-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 324 — Jason Rezaian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it became clear that Ahmadinejad was probably going to lose. And on the night of the election it was announced that he won in a landslide and nobody still accepts that decision. So there were massive street publications.”
2019-05-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 324 — Jason Rezaian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so this is May of 2009. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who you all remember, was running for his second term in office. There was a reformist candidate who was building up a lot of steam and popularity. Iranian Electoral cycles are thankfully much shorter than ours. They only last three or four weeks. Most are, yeah. Yeah, it's about three weeks. So a lot happens in a very short period of time.”
2019-05-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 324 — Jason Rezaian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I will be the first to admit that I didn't think that that campaign and the election in 2009, which is still being contested, nobody, including me, predicted how that would go and what a volatile moment would be. And also what a kind of career opening it would be for me. I started writing about that campaign.”
2019-05-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 324 — Jason Rezaian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was facing certain bankruptcy. I had a small body of journalistic work that I had amassed over a decade period and thought to myself, here's a chance. I mean, I was 33 years old. My resume was filled with basically Persian rug merchant and sometimes freelance correspondent. It wasn't like Google or any of the other tech companies in San Francisco. It used to get it perfectly. So I made a very calculated decision and I moved to Tehran 10 years ago this month.”
2019-05-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 324 — Jason Rezaian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It poses a threat to its own people and its neighborhood. But I defy you to tell me how it poses a threat to our collective way of life here in the United States of America.”
2019-05-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 324 — Jason Rezaian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think, like other Countries that are isolated for whatever reason from American view, the realities on the ground are really different than what you hear about. And when we're talking about countries that are run by authoritarian governments like Iran or Cuba, which I had traveled to previously, the things that we believe are wrong with those countries are not the things that are actually wrong. I mean, the threat that an Iran poses to the world is to its own people. It's not to our American way of life. So I found a very vibrant society, one where there was a lot of internal debate about the direction that people wanted the country to go. And frankly, a really young country with a lot of energy. And I think anybody that's been there, I have a friend from Tehran who's actually in the audience tonight.”
2019-05-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 324 — Jason Rezaian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was 25 the first time I went to Iran and I didn't grow up speaking Persian I had a large extended Iranian American family and I was exposed to the language and the truth It wasn't until I was a bit older and got that infamous travel bug and started going to different parts of the world that I really wanted to go and see what Iran was all about.”
2019-05-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 324 — Jason Rezaian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had been a dozen times before, but it still sticks out as one of the seminal experiences for me in becoming a journalist.”
2019-05-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 324 — Jason Rezaian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In an incredible way. I mean, I knew that I wanted to write and do it for a living. I just didn't think it was actually going to be possible. And he was one of the first people that told me that if this is the thing that you think that you want to do, maybe it's not for you. But if it's the thing that you know is the only thing that you can probably do, then it is for you. And that's the way he felt about it. And so I spent a lot of time with him in the semester that I was a student, but more so in the years following. I'd seek him out. His in-laws lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, so I'd visit him there, and I'd come to Washington to see him from time to time. And I don't write about it in the book, but we actually took a trip together to Iran, which was, I think, probably the”
2019-05-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 324 — Jason Rezaian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He and others have been incredibly helpful. Not only hostages in Iran, but other journalists who have been held captive, I always have to give a shout out to my friend David Rode, who was with the New York Times. And now it's a New Yorker who was held by the Taliban for many months and escaped. He was the person that in the weeks after my release was really the most influential in telling me, you're going to be okay, but here is the roadmap to recovery and it's going to be a long one.”
2019-05-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 324 — Jason Rezaian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think some of them phoned it in, sent emissaries, and quite a few of them actually showed up at the shop. We have pictures of some of those hostages, and me as a little five-year-old kid and my big brother, who was about 11 at the time. And actually one of the former hostages who had a very long career at the State Department after his release has become a friend. And he lives in northern Virginia. And every time I go and visit him and his wife at their home, he points to the rug in the corner and says, your dad gave me that one and he kicks it over and there's the Razion Persian rug label on the back of it still from 40 years ago.”
2019-05-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 324 — Jason Rezaian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a major way, I mean, I think we used to talk about it that in the months leading up to To the hostage crisis in the fall of 1979, he was doing hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales every month. And then it ground to an immediate halt. For those of you who are of the age of remembering that period of time, there was a lot of angst directed at Iranians at the country, but also Iranians living here in the United States. And I think for him, it was incredibly jarring because he had come to this country in 1959. He'd been living here for 20 years, was a citizen. His wife was American, his children were American. He was American as far as he was concerned. And the situation turned on him, even in very progressive Northern California.”
2019-05-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 324 — Jason Rezaian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was one of the first Persian rug merchants on the West Coast before Oriental rug businesses was even a stereotype in this country. We were living it.”
2019-05-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 324 — Jason Rezaian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was pretty great. We grew up about 15 miles north of San Francisco in Marin County. On a big piece of land Trees and a stream running through it, and a couple of horses and some chickens. You know, my dad was from Iran, and my mom was obviously from the suburbs here. And it seemed like a really normal life to us, but it turns out it was a little bit different than other people's.”
2019-05-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 324 — Jason Rezaian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source